One of the skills we want all of our kids to learn is how to present. This seems like one of those universally useful things: being able to get up in front of an audience and get them to listen to you. Doing this with or without the help of images. Answering questions from the audience. Pretty much anything you might do, even say create art, is likely to require this at some point (eg the opening of your art show).

So every weekend we are now having presentations. We have created a nice setup for this at our place including a projector and large screen (actually a white wall). We are keeping these short at less than 10 minutes each. So far topics have included Immortality in Myths, Lord of the Flies compared to Animal Farm, and An Overview of Corning (as in the company). As part of the process we all provide constructive feedback which is another skill to learn (and one we could all be better at). We have already seen second versions of some of the presentations with significant improvement.

Our kids rightly called us out and said we have to present too! It’s of course something I love to do, so I was thrilled to be asked. My first presentation was on the question of whether the oceans could evaporate into the atmosphere – a question that our daughter had asked. It appears that the answer is no for any kind of temperature that humans could survive!

One of the skills we want all of our kids to learn is how to present. This seems like one of those universally useful things: being able to get up in front of an audience and get them to listen to you. Doing this with or without the help of images. Answering questions from the audience. Pretty much anything you might do, even say create art, is likely to require this at some point (eg the opening of your art show).

So every weekend we are now having presentations. We have created a nice setup for this at our place including a projector and large screen (actually a white wall). We are keeping these short at less than 10 minutes each. So far topics have included Immortality in Myths, Lord of the Flies compared to Animal Farm, and An Overview of Corning (as in the company). As part of the process we all provide constructive feedback which is another skill to learn (and one we could all be better at). We have already seen second versions of some of the presentations with significant improvement.

Our kids rightly called us out and said we have to present too! It’s of course something I love to do, so I was thrilled to be asked. My first presentation was on the question of whether the oceans could evaporate into the atmosphere – a question that our daughter had asked. It appears that the answer is no for any kind of temperature that humans could survive!